Gangsterland: A Novel (38 page)

It hadn’t even occurred to David that Dr. Kirsch was Jewish. A year ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. A couple of months, even, it wouldn’t have registered. But now, these were his people, the
chai
a part of his daily life, as much as the omertà used to be. That was the thing: Omertà was a made-up code to keep crooks quiet, a false loyalty born out of movies, dumb fucks like Slim Joe adopting it as a religion in place of something with actual meaning. Maybe most Jews didn’t believe even half of their religion, but he hadn’t met one who didn’t understand the struggle to survive, faith or no faith.

Dr. Kirsch had to die. But it all boiled back to that day at the Parker House, that hotel room, those four guys Sal Cupertine had to kill. Wasn’t he a different person now, Sal only a thing of his past? And Sal
had
to kill those men. There’d been no other way. He’d come across false witnesses, and he’d done what he had to do. Even God considered that entrapment. What was it the Torah said?
Then you should do to him as he plotted to do to his brother, and you shall thus abolish evil from among you.

David stuffed Dr. Kirsch’s wallet, keys, and necklace into his pockets. It was 7:07 p.m. He was running two minutes behind schedule, yet Rabbi David Cohen suddenly found himself muttering Hebrew—
Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba
—the Burial Kaddish slipping from his mouth with what had become his usual ease, though David knew Dr. Kirsch would never actually be buried. At least not most of him.

After cleaning himself up, David walked up Eastern to Flamingo and then back onto the campus of Desert Springs Hospital, where he’d been dropped off earlier that evening, to hail a cab. The walk gave him an opportunity to get his adrenaline in check. Normally, he liked a meal after killing someone, but his night was still a work in progress, albeit one with a strict timeline.

The entrance to the emergency room came up on David’s right. There were a few people standing outside talking on cell phones or smoking, and through the sliding doors David could see that the waiting room was packed with people. In the last two months, David had visited the hospital at least once each week in his official capacity, sometimes two or three times in a day if there was someone particularly wealthy or particularly ailing that Bennie wanted him to see. The last time, he’d gone with Rabbi Kales. One of the members of their temple, Bert Feinstein, had suffered a stroke while playing craps at the Mirage and was taken to Desert Springs already in a coma. The family had asked for Rabbi Kales to come when it appeared the last hours were upon them, and Rabbi Kales had asked David to come, too.

“I guess I need the practice,” David said.

Rabbi Kales didn’t respond at first, he just stood in the doorway to David’s office and stared at him, incredulous. “Then you should stay here,” Rabbi Kales finally said, his voice hardly above a whisper, and stalked he out of David’s office.

David caught up to him in the parking lot. It was just after noon, and the kids were all outside on the playground, laughing, shouting. “Wait,” David said. “I’ll take you.”

“Don’t bother,” Rabbi Kales said. “I forget that you pretend to have no soul.”

David paused. Rabbi Kales knew the right words for every occasion, the bastard, so David looked for his own right words, settling on, “I’m sorry.” David tried to remember the last time he had actually apologized to anyone.

“This is not someone who has done wrong,” Rabbi Kales said. “This is someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s friend. They are looking to us for comfort. If you cannot provide that, if you cannot treat the death of a man honestly, for the first time in your life, then stay here.”

“I can do this,” David said.

“Then get your yarmulke and your Torah.”

They were met in the hospital lobby by Bert’s granddaughter Elissa. David had seen her at the temple plenty of times, since she came after school and worked as a tutor for the younger kids. But seeing her at the hospital, David was struck by how little she looked like the young woman he remembered. She’d been crying, so her eyes were puffy, aging her in the bad hospital light.

Bert’s room was crowded with people—Bert’s wife, Lois, who’d once made David eat a cookie made of applesauce and coconut and something he presumed was straight lard; Elissa’s parents, Jack and Rochelle, as well as her aunt and uncle,
Margaret and Carl, and their two teenage sons whose names David couldn’t remember, since they showed up at temple only on the rarest of occasions—all of whom turned and gazed upon Rabbi Kales with a mixture of melancholy and relief.

Rabbi Kales immediately went to work: He touched each person gently as he made his way toward Lois, whom he hugged while she sobbed into his shoulder. And there, in the middle of the room, was Bert Feinstein. He had an IV in one arm, but there were suspiciously few machines beeping in the room. David thought maybe it didn’t matter at this point, that there were no heroic recoveries to be made.

It occurred to David that he’d been surrounded by plenty of dead people in his life but very few in the process of dying a natural death. His own father was murdered. His mother? She could be dead by now, too, he supposed, which brought a wave of sadness over him. How could he not know? How could he live the rest of his life not ever knowing? And would she die alone? Would she be in some hospital by herself? And what of Jennifer? William . . . he couldn’t bear to even let his eventual demise enter his head.

“Rabbi Cohen,” Rabbi Kales said softly, “will lead us in the Mi Sheberakh.”

“In English, please,” Lois said. “Bert never understood Hebrew.”

David had said the Mi Sheberakh many times over the course of the last several months, but never in a situation like this. It was a prayer made for the ill, and it was usually done during services. He knew it in Hebrew phonetically, just like a kid at his bar mitzvah, but because people concerned about the life-or-death situation of a loved one tend to like to know what is being said, he’d found that more often than not he was asked
to read it in English, and each time he found himself moved that the prayer was asking not just that the person be healed physically—and if it came down to someone needing the prayer, it was usually a grave situation—but that, too, their spirit be cleansed.

“Of course,” David said. Bert Feinstein made it through only the first half of the prayer, but David kept reciting, sending Bert’s healed soul into whatever came next.

David and Rabbi Kales spent the next several hours with the family, helping them with the details of death, so that when they finally headed back to Summerlin, it was rush hour. “You did very well today, Rabbi Cohen,” Rabbi Kales said. The red glare from all the brake lights gave everything a spectral glow.

“It was just a prayer,” David said.

“No, it was more than that,” Rabbi Kales said. “Your being there was a comfort to the younger ones. They look up to you. It’s a special gift, David, even if you don’t want it.”

“Here’s what I’m trying to understand,” David said. “I feel like I’m pretty acquainted with death, but seeing that man there just slip away, no thrashing around, not gasping for breath, he just . . . he just stopped. It didn’t seem right. Why doesn’t the body fight more?”

“We fight every day,” Rabbi Kales said.

David supposed that was true. But for what? “So, tell me, what happens next?”

“He’ll be at the funeral home in the morning.”

“No,” David said, “I mean what happens
next
.”

“Eventually, when the Moshiach returns, we’ll all live in peace, in our most perfect state, and all the world will be Israel.”

“I know that,” David said. “I know what the books say. But what happens to me, Rabbi Kales? What about me?”

Rabbi Kales sighed. “Sal Cupertine,” Rabbi Kales said, “he is already gone. Rabbi David Cohen still has a chance.”

“He’s not gone,” David said. “He’ll never be gone. As long as my wife is still alive, Sal Cupertine is still alive. Because I’m going back to her at some point, Rabbi. You can believe that.”

“I can believe that,” Rabbi Kales said. “But for the choices we’ve made,” he continued, “we’re likely to rot together.”

David repeated Rabbi Kales’s words in his mind again as he walked up to the main entrance of the hospital. In truth, he’d thought about those words somewhat constantly over the course of the last several weeks. Was his eternity going to be spent with the people he’d worked alongside, the Fat Montes and Slim Joes he’d spent all these years running with, or was he going to have Jennifer and William there? What about his own father? Would he be there? David had never even considered the idea of an afterlife until he’d fallen in love, and even then it wasn’t until he thought that he might not ever see Jennifer and William again that it mattered.

For the first time in his life, he actually had some kind of purpose. There were days when he’d spend hours—hours!—listening to other people’s problems and offering them advice that they seemed to find useful. At first, he hated that shit. And if he had to choose how to live his life, he wouldn’t choose to spend his time doing that. And yet. Those same people would come back a few days later and tell him how much his words had helped them figure out how to plan their daughter’s wedding, or deal with their taxes, or figure out whether to have the holidays at home or to fly back to Portland to see the kids. They were mundane problems, the issues he dealt with, but David had come to learn that it was the mundane shit of life that sent people into ever-widening spirals of anxiety.

There was a line of at least fifteen people standing in front of the hospital’s entrance, waiting for cabs, just like in front of one of the casinos, so David stood in the back of the line and bided his time. When he finally reached the head, there was a young man dressed in all black. He blew a whistle, and a yellow cab pulled up.

“Where to, sir?” the young man asked.

“That park off Rancho,” David said. He checked his watch. He was running a few minutes late for a meeting he’d scheduled with Gray Beard, the “doctor” who’d snipped the wires out of his jaw.

“Twin Lakes?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” David said. “Is there some kind of problem?”

“I only ask because, at night, that’s not a great part of town, sir, so if you’re looking for a nice place to take a walk or something, I can recommend several lovely places in Green Valley.”

“I look like I can’t handle myself in a park?” David asked.

David got into the cab without another word.

“So, Lorenzi Park?” the cab driver asked. “That’s Twin Lakes. Everything here has two names.”

“Yeah,” David said, and he heard his old self creep back into his voice. “Unless you think it’s too scary.”

The cab driver looked at David in his rearview mirror. “I think you’ll be fine, buddy.”

David had the cab driver drop him off on the opposite side of Lorenzi Park from where he was meeting with Gray Beard and told him to wait. He’d come down to the park earlier in the
week with a proposition: If David could get him some decent medical gear—even if it was just an autoclave from this century so that he could sterilize his tools over something other than the fucking grill—would Gray Beard be willing to do him a couple of small favors?

“I’m a doctor,” Gray Beard had said, “so I won’t be killing anybody, right? I stick to the Hippocratic.”

“Yeah,” David said. They were inside his RV, and Gray Beard’s partner, whom David had learned was named Marvin, was in the back bedroom smoking a blunt and watching a kung fu movie. “I see that.”